1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to messaging. Specifically, the present inventions relate to methods and systems for unified messaging.
2. General Background and Related Art
In our modern telecommunications era, messaging is carried out in various ways, such as by leaving a phone message or sending electronic mail. To enable efficient message search and retrieval, messages may be indexed according to date received, date sent, sender, subject, etc.
Information management techniques attempt to organize information such that search and retrieval are easy and meaningful. Such techniques have been applied to electronic mail systems. Advanced systems enable users to search e-mail messages based on their content. For example, a user may enter a certain keyword as a search criterion, and the mail system will return a set of all messages that contain the keyword.
Conventional voice messages may be transferred to an electronic mail system as a digital file attachment wherein an audio signal is encoded as a digital representation. One popular form of such files is xe2x80x9c*.wavxe2x80x9d. There are other such waveform files as well. Thus, an audio file, such as a voicemail message, can be sent as an attachment over the Internet. For example, a phone message may be intercepted by a server that detects when the intended recipient of a call is absent. The audio phone message may be digitized to generate a wave signal representation of the voice message, and then sent as an attachment to a pre-specified e-mail address of the recipient. Accordingly, the recipient may be able to access voice messages by means other than calling his voice mail box on the telephone, such as through e-mail. An audio voice mail attachment may be played using appropriate software when the e-mail message to which it is attached is opened by the recipient.
One advantage of sending a voice message as an attachment in an electronic mail system is that the message can be indexed according to certain criteria, such as by date received. As such, the recipient may search and retrieve messages based on the criteria. Such selective search and retrieval of messages is not possible if a voice message is left on a conventional phone. That is, when a voice message is sent to an electronic mail system, some information management techniques may be applied to facilitate message search and retrieval.
However, it is not possible to directly apply information management techniques to the content of voice messages that are sent to electronic systems as attachments. Indeed, the digital waveform exists in its intrinsic signal form instead of in digital textual form. Indexing digital voicemail messages according to their content would be more semantically meaningful to users.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and system that allows users to search and retrieve information based on the content of voicemail messages in an e-mail system.